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Gearing changes: For patch 5.0, the biggest change is that you are going to need to reforge back into a heavy-spirit gearing. Intellect no longer provides you any increase to your mana pool size, and we lost the talents that gave us mana regen from intellect. If you are having any problems at all, go get more spirit.

New abilities:

Ironbark: A damage reduction ability you can put on other people. This is your new tank damage reduction cooldown.

Wild mushrooms & Wild mushroom bloom: Your mushrooms now heal instead of doing damage. This is a situational spell, since they don’t hit very hard. Only use wild mushrooms when nothing else is going on, and pre-place them (if the damage already happened, then you are better off just casting rejuv than trying to set up shrooms and bloom them). You want to set up shrooms on stack points if you have time prior to burst AOE phases. You can also stack them up before a pull (on things like heroic ultraxion).

Other spell changes:

Lifebloom: The duration of lifebloom is longer now (15 sec). The duration is still refreshed with direct heals. You can only have it on one target at a time, but for raiding when glyphed (glyph of lifebloom), your 3 stack of LB will swap to another person. For PvP purposes, a different glyph (Glyph of blooming) will shorten the duration and give you a bigger bloom.

Swiftmend: Now that the old talents are out, Efflorescence is now permanently attached to Swiftmend.

Mastery: We have the same Harmony mastery, but it now lasts long enough (20 seconds) that your swiftmend casts alone will keep it up, so you shouldn’t have to worry about the harmony timer anymore. If your harmony up-time is low, then you probably need to cast more swiftmend.

Rebirth: Now reses people with 60% health without a glyph, so the glyph isn’t mandatory.

Tree form changes: The tree form cooldown is now part of the incarnation talent, which is the best talent on that tier for resto (because this doubles as both a healing increase talent and a mana conservation talent). In addition, one of our new minor glyphs gives us back a cosmetic perma-tree form with the original tree graphic. It doesn’t provide any benefits other than changing how you look.

Overall healing style in 5.0: You won’t need to refresh lifebloom as much, and you won’t have to manage harmony quite as closely. This frees up some time for doing other things. Set up shrooms on stack points prior to a known burst AOE phase. You will need to reforge into more spirit on your gear or you will go out of mana quickly.